“El hecho ocurrió en el mes de febrero de 1969, al norte de Boston, en Cambridge. No lo escribí inmediatamente porque mi propósito fue olvidarlo, para no perder la razón”. Con estas palabras empieza Jorge Luis Borges su relato El Otro , en el que explica su “encuentro” casual en un banco del parque con un hombre más joven. Ambos empiezan a entablar una conversación, en el transcurso de la cual se desvela que el banco en el que están sentados se encuentra en Cambridge y en Ginebra al mismo tiempo y en dos momentos cronológicos distintos. En realidad, el encuentro entre un hombre de veinte años y otro de más de setenta, no es más que el encuentro del autor consigo mismo. Mientras el primero atribuye el encuentro a un sueño, para el segundo la escritura es la única manera de olvidarlo. El “otro” con el que se encuentra Borges no es más que una versión joven de él mismo y, por eso, precisamente, se trata de dos personas diferentes. El banco junto al río (el río Charles, para uno y el Ródano, para otro) y una alusión a Heráclito nos recuerda que nada permanece, que todo está cambiando constantemente y que el reencuentro con uno mismo que ya creíamos pasado no puede ser sino difícil y traumático, una realidad que parece absurda. En El Otro, Borges se mira en su alter ego como en un espejo. La propia escritura se transforma en un espejo. “Medio siglo no pasa en vano. Bajo nuestra conversación de personas de miscelánea lectura y gustos diversos, comprendí que no podíamos entendernos. Éramos demasiado distintos y demasiado parecidos. No podíamos engañarnos, lo cual hace difícil el diálogo. Cada uno de los dos era el remedo caricaturesco del otro. La situación era harto anormal para durar mucho más tiempo. Aconsejar o discutir era inútil, porque su inevitable destino era ser el que soy” .

Al igual que Borges, Dostoyevski, Auster, Cronenberg y tantos otros, los hermanos MP & MP Rosado (Miguel Pablo y Manuel Pedro Rosado) exploran con sus trabajos el tema de la identidad. Ellos no necesitan de recursos literarios para establecer paralelismos a partir de la figura del doble, del otro o del doppelgänger. No es necesario encontrarse con su alter ego en un banco junto al río, ni hacerse mala sangre ante la visión de una versión de uno mismo que se comporta como uno nunca lo haría, ni hacerse pasar por un detective privado con nombre de escritor en respuesta a una llamada telefónica equivocada. MP & MP Rosado son hermanos gemelos y, en sus trabajos exploran esta circunstancia (“jugamos con ello, pero es evidente que nos interesa. Hemos leído mucho sobre el tema, porque nosotros, como todo el mundo, tenemos muchas cosas que resolver cada uno consigo mismo y frente a los otros. Aunque también es verdad que hay hermanos con más confianza e intimidad que nosotros que, en realidad, no tenemos ninguna”). Para hablar de su relación en el proceso creativo, ellos mismos aluden a uno de los episodios de la película Coffee and Cigarrettes (2003) de Jim Jarmusch, titulado Twins en el que la conversación entre los gemelos, protagonizados por Cinqué y Joie Lee, sentados tomando café y fumando cigarrillos, evidencia un perfecto entendimiento que, sin embargo, constantemente oscila entre el estar totalmente de acuerdo y el tener opiniones y gustos bien distintos. La irrupción del camarero, interpretado por Steve Buscemi, que les explica la curiosa historia del hermano gemelo secreto de Elvis Presley (el que le suplantó en algunos momentos y, por supuesto, el que engordó y vistió aquellos exagerados trajes blancos de pata de elefante) no sirve sino para reforzar su sincronía llegando incluso a remover el café del otro (aunque con leche y azúcar en un caso y negro en el otro).

La dinámica de MP & MP Rosado se basa en un trabajo en equipo, en una colaboración en la “uno dibuja y el otro borra. Mientras uno hace el otro deshace. Él destruye muchas cosas que yo planteo y otras yo se las destruyo. Y la mezcla de todo es lo que hace que nos quedemos con algo”. Se ven como un solo artista y responden a las entrevistas con una sola voz. Al igual que en otros casos de artistas hermanos, como Jane y Louis Wilson, Jake y Dinos Chapman, Liesbeth y Angelique Raeven o Mike y Douglas Starn, entre otros, la presencia del doble o la alteridad se convierten en hilos articuladores de su investigación artística.

Presencias duplicadas

Identidad y alteridad son construcciones sociales que se confirman en su carácter relacional. Para el antropólogo francés Marc Augé, hemos aprendido a dudar de las identidades absolutas, simples y sustanciales, tanto en el plan colectivo como en el individual. La identidad se construye en el nivel individual a través de las experiencias y las relaciones con el otro. No hay identidad sin la presencia de los otros. ¿Quiénes somos? ¿Qué nos hace únicos? ¿En qué se basa nuestra individualidad? ¿Somos lo que creemos ser? Son preguntas que sólo pueden obtener respuestas en relación con el otro, y a la vez están condicionadas por la pertenencia a un contexto, a un espacio y un tiempo determinados. Cualquier biografía sólo puede ser completa si junto a los datos personales, los que pertenecen al entorno privado, aparecen los hechos “históricos” que igualmente nos determinan y nos condicionan. Así lo explicaba el artista Félix González-Torres al hacer referencia a sus “retratos”: “Pensamos que somos quienes somos, habitualmente pensamos en un sujeto unitario. En el presente (…) No somos lo que creemos que somos, sino una compilación de textos. Una compilación de historias, pasado, presente y futuro, siempre, siempre, eliminando, añadiendo, restando, sumando”.

Y así terminaba siendo un fragmento de su propio autorretrato:

Red Canoe 1987 Watercolours 1964 Paris 1985 Supreme Court 1986 Blue Lake 1986 Our own Apartment 1976 Rosa 1977 Güaimaro 1957 New York City 1979…

En el caso de MP & MP Rosado la aparición de autorretratos o la representación de sus presencias duplicadas en sus trabajos ha sido recurrente. En sus obras utilizan una gran diversidad de medios y materiales, como fotografía, pintura, escultura y, especialmente, instalaciones, en las que a veces conjugan los medios anteriores para crear unos entornos de un fuerte carácter escenográfico. Sus instalaciones (especialmente entre 2003 y 2008), nos adentran en escenas ilusorias, llenas de trampas ópticas que evidencian todo el artificio, la tramoya de la representación a la que estamos asistiendo. La ambigüedad entre lo que se representa y los mecanismos de su representación, entre la fantasía, la imaginación y el artificio entroncaría directamente con las fuentes del barroco.

En su instalación Para acabar (2004), presentada en la Bienal de Pontevedra al igual que Limbo (2004), expuesta en el Centro de Arte Santa Mónica de Barcelona, unos personajes, que parecen alter egos de los propios artistas, quedan atrapados, camuflados entre las tablas de madera del suelo, en el caso de Pontevedra o dentro del muro y tapados por falsos ladrillos, en el caso de Barcelona. En ambos, se genera una atmósfera extraña, en la que realidad y ficción se superponen. En Limbo, los artistas aluden a la expresión “estar en el limbo”, es decir, en un estado en definición y más concretamente siguiendo la observación del antropólogo Manuel Delgado sobre lo liminar, sobre las personas que más que estar en el borde son el borde, el tránsito hacia algo. Ser el borde implica estar en una zona difusa, tener una identidad difusa. Los personajes de Limbo están en el límite, parcialmente dentro y fuera del muro a la vez, en el límite y en ninguna parte en realidad. No “son” porque todavía no se han encontrado con algo en relación a lo que definirse. Los falsos ladrillos, en realidad papel de pared con estampado de muro de ladrillos, y la no ocultación de que se trata de una construcción, de que hablamos, en definitiva, de una escenografía, nos acerca a esta idea de ilusionismo, de artificio, de ficción. En realidad, los Rosado trabajan con objetos y situaciones cotidianas, muy reconocibles, pero con pequeñas diferencias respecto a la realidad y esto es lo que los hace inquietantes, lo que nos adentra en una realidad con fisuras, que nos acerca a otra dimensión, la que no se ve, ni se nombra, el conflicto, la indeterminación, la indefinición, la ambigüedad, lo que se desconoce, lo que no se sabe con certeza.

Lugares fronterizos

Las figuras humanas, realizadas en cera o resina policromada, herederas tanto de la tradición de la imaginería religiosa en Andalucía, como del trabajo de otros artistas de la escena internacional con los cuales los Rosado se sienten vinculados, como Bruce Nauman, Paul McCarthy, Robert Gober o Thomas Schutte, desaparecen progresivamente de sus trabajos. No significa esto, sin embargo que la exploración de la identidad se haya resuelto o detenido, sino más bien de una necesidad de ahondar en la fragilidad de esa misma identidad y, al mismo tiempo, de no ser tan explícitos o dar demasiadas pautas de interpretación al espectador sino de permitirle más bien la identificación con sus propias experiencias y referentes.

En Ventanas iluminadas, una exposición comisariada por José Lebrero en el Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo en el año 2005, los Rosado transforman el espacio expositivo en una especie de bosque en el que cada árbol representa un bloque de pisos de una ciudad anónima, de los que cuelga una especie de cubos con una o varias ventanas. Algunas de las ventanas parecen inaccesibles y cegadas, otras presentan espejos o cortinas, mientras otras están totalmente abiertas. Las ventanas iluminadas se convierten en fragmentos de una ciudad sin nombre, y se inspiran en un texto de Roberto Arlt, titulado Aguas porteñas, en el que el autor observa la ciudad como el lugar en el que tienen lugar multitud de vivencias, de experiencias, de situaciones y de infinitas historias que uno nunca podrá abarcar. “Nada más llamativo en el cubo negro de la noche que un rectángulo de luz amarilla.”, escribía Arlt (y nos recuerda Enrique Vila-Matas en “La ventana sonámbula” ), “¿Quiénes están ahí adentro? ¿Jugadores, ladrones, suicidas, enfermos? ¿Nace o muere alguien en ese lugar? Ventana iluminada en la madrugada. Si se pudiera escribir todo lo que se oculta detrás de tus vidrios biselados o rotos se escribiría el más angustioso poema que conoce la humanidad”.

Asimismo, las ventanas son esos lugares fronterizos, los límites ambiguos entre dentro y fuera, entre lo que se muestra y lo que se oculta, entre lo público y lo privado, el umbral en el que nuestra identidad entra en relación con el otro. Una vez más, el carácter escenográfico de la instalación, la evidencia del material, sobretodo papel y madera, del que están hechas las casas, su factura en forma de bloques y cajas subraya de forma muy evidente la idea de representación y de infinita potencialidad de imaginar historias, personajes y situaciones. Quizás las palabras de Italo Calvino, también citadas por Vila-Matas, definen mejor que nadie el potencial de la instalación: “En el instante previo al momento en que empezamos a escribir, tenemos a nuestra disposición el mundo, un mundo dado en bloques, sin un antes y un después, el mundo como memoria individual y como potencialidad implícita”.

El mundo como memoria individual y como potencialidad implícita

Los árboles, esta vez en forma de restos ennegrecidos vuelven a aparecer en un trabajo posterior de MP & MP Rosado. En el 2008 presentan la instalación Spleen en la Galería Pepe Cobo en Madrid. En esta ocasión, aparecen restos de árboles realizados en terracota, distorsionados, retorcidos y convertidos en receptáculos de objetos. Los árboles están “abrazados” de un modo asfixiante o atrapados por cuerdas. Junto a ellos aparecen distintos elementos como deportivas, libros o sillas, todos ellos desmembrados o desubicados aunque fácilmente reconocibles. Aparece aquí un elemento inquietante que es lo truncado en lo cotidiano, lo familiar, que nos sitúa en un universo irreal, turbador y desconocido. Spleen, explicaban los Rosado en una entrevista mantenida con Javier Hontoria , “es el humor tétrico que produce el tedio de la vida… La búsqueda de sensaciones lleva al hastío o la melancolía. Existe un profundo sentimiento de insatisfacción de la condición humana en la actualidad que provoca un hondo sentimiento de soledad y vacío, a partir de aquí surge la angustia, el pesimismo, la melancolía…”. Nuestra sociedad es la del consumo. Nuestra identidad, individual y colectiva se define no por lo que somos, sino por lo que consumimos. El índice de consumo es el índice de salud de un país. Pero la acumulación de cosas lleva al sinsentido, a la desidia, al desgaste, al agotamiento.

MP & MP Rosado no han dejado de moverse en un espacio indeterminado, marginal en el sentido de tránsito y de búsqueda, de lugares expuestos al fracaso. A diferencia de trabajos anteriores, en los que las situaciones reflejaban escenarios vacíos, en Spleen y otras obras posteriores, hay un despojamiento de la puesta en escena, ya no asistimos a una representación o a los elementos que configuran una representación, sino que nos encontramos con una serie de restos, de ruinas, que parecen responder a un estado interior de memoria, de recuerdos y de contemplación quizá más desencantada que meditativa.

Cuarto Gabinete, una de sus intervenciones posteriores (2009) continúa el hilo iniciado en Ruinas menores, un trabajo expuesto en las salas de Arqueología del Museo de Cádiz (2009) formado por pequeños objetos presentados como restos. En Matadero de Madrid, lugar que acogió Cuarto Gabinete, los artistas presentan una instalación con un tono post-apocalíptico, cuyos restos se asemejan más bien a los de un naufragio. Amigos de citas y referencias literarias, cinematográficas o musicales son los propios artistas los que nos dan la clave para entender su punto de partida: el capítulo V del libro La poética del espacio (1957) del filósofo y crítico Gaston Bachelard, dedicado a las conchas. En dicho capítulo, la aproximación fenomenológica de Bachelard escribe sobre la concha-casa del ceramista francés Bernard Palissy (1510-1589): “El cuarto-gabinete de Bernard Palissy es una síntesis de la casa, de la concha y de la gruta”. Palissy quería erigir como refugio una concha enroscada por la que, al avanzar, el visitante se sintiese confuso, extrañado y vacilante. La concha como casa donde habitar, llena de recuerdos e imágenes, contactos y pérdidas, es el lugar donde nuestra identidad se construye desde dentro, como una concha.

Cuarto Gabinete consiste en una serie de cortinas creadas a partir de conchas, caracolas, palos y otros objetos encontrados en la playa, que van dividiendo el espacio. El carácter manufacturado de las cortinas unido al espacio crudo en el que se encuentran, en el que no se disimulan tuberías y en el que las paredes permanecen sin pintar, contribuye a crear una atmósfera de naufragio, de huellas, de memoria, quizás de la pérdida de la identidad, no tanto individual, sino colectiva. Aunque el entorno no sea ahora tan escenográfico como en trabajos anteriores, sigue existiendo un juego entre realidad y ficción, realidad y simulacro, aunque resuelto ahora de una manera mucho más sutil, puesto que junto a las conchas, o mejor dicho, camufladas entre ellas, se encuentran sus réplicas, imposible de distinguir de las reales.

El entorno creado en Cuarto Gabinete no pertenece al sueño ni a la vigilia, a lo conocido ni a lo extraño. Se parece al futuro desencantado y decadente plasmado en el film Blade Runner, en el que los animales han sido sustituidos por su réplica y en el que la alta tecnología convive con una cotidianeidad desgastada, poblada de objetos, restos y reliquias. Como en The Road, la novela de Corman McCarthy, parece que nos adentramos en un entorno post-apocalíptico, en el que lo importante no es el cataclismo sucedido que ha destruido la civilización y prácticamente toda forma de vida, sino la desolación ante el devenir de una sociedad que se va despojando de sus valores y de su propia conciencia para terminar completamente deshumanizada y “extrañada”. Finalmente, la “colección” de ruinas y fragmentos de Cuarto Gabinete, de restos encontrados que se convierten en memoria, parecen aludir también a la posibilidad de un nuevo inicio, a la necesidad de un replegarse en si mismo para volver a la esencia, para reflejar lo humano, para poder construir un nuevo yo, individual y colectivo.

En estos trabajos más recientes de MP & MP Rosado se ha diluido cualquier rastro de humor. Ya no es posible el equívoco, ni la lectura superficial. Hay algo en la gravedad de la atmósfera que evidencia una voluntad de toque de atención por parte de los artistas. Es una crítica y mucho más que una crítica. MP & MP Rosado señalan que no podemos seguir así. Hemos llegado al límite de la sobreexplotación, estamos llegando al agotamiento, al fin de los recursos y a una pérdida de conciencia, a una progresiva deshumanización. Los Rosado nos acercan al paisaje después del naufragio. El camino hacia el mar era, en la novela de McCarthy, el único camino hacia la esperanza que, aunque frustrada, terminaba con una posibilidad (mínima, eso sí) de un nuevo comienzo. En el caso de Cuarto Gabinete la esperanza está en replegarnos en nuestra concha, en mirar hacia dentro para construir una nueva identidad, un nuevo entorno.

Con sus trabajos, MP & MP Rosado exploran la construcción del yo, “como un inmenso espejo en el que nos reconocemos” . De este modo, su búsqueda puede verse como una banda de Moebius, con una sola cara y un solo borde infinitamente conectados, una superficie en la que las dos dimensiones (la identidad individual y la identidad colectiva) están comunicados, de modo que para pasar de un lado a otro no hay que cruzar ningún borde.

Bibliografía

ALIAGA, Juan Vicente. Más dura será la caída. Unas notas sobre MP&MP Rosado. Fundación NMAC. Montenmedio Arte Contemporáneo, Vejer de la Frontera. Cádiz, 2003.

BARBANCHO, Juan Ramón. De Cuerpo presente. Narrativas de Cuerpo en Andalucía. Consejería de Cultura, Junta de Andalucía, 2007.

CLOT, Manel. “Miedo escénico (y un imposible reflejo)”. La Intimidad, Galería Pepe Cobo, Sevilla, 2002

DE CARLOS, Isabel. On Reason and Emotion. Catálogo de la Bienal de Sydney, 2004.

G. TORRES, David y VON HAFE, Miguel. “Una conversación sobre viaje, contexto e Intensidad”. En el principio fue el viaje. Catálogo 28 Bienal de Pontevedra, 2004.

G. TORRES, David. “Entrevista a MP & MP Rosado”. Butlletí. Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona, núm. 12, abril 2005.

HONTORIA, Javier. “Entrevista a MP & MP Rosado”. El Cultural. El Mundo, Madrid, 27 de marzo de 2008.

MARÍN MEDINA, José. Figuraciones. Arte civil + Magicismos + Espacios de Frontera. Caja Madrid, 2003.

MARTIN, Alberto. “Dibujos. MP & MP Rosado” en El vértigo de la caída. Universidad de Salamanca, 2009.

MEDINA, José Marin. “Rosado y la poética del espacio. Cuarto-Gabinete”. El Cultural. El Mundo, Madrid, 11 de diciembre de 2009.

MOLINA FOIX, Vicente. “Toda la provocación oculta en un retrato”. El País, Madrid, 9 de noviembre de 2008.

MONTES, Javier. “Gabinete con fantasma”. ABCD las artes y las letras, Madrid, 20 de mayo de 2009.

NAHARRO, Rosa, “Identidad a la deriva” en A*DESK (www.a-desk.org), núm 53, Barcelona, 18 de enero de 2010.

RÍO, Francisco del y MONTES, Javier. Como quien mueve las brasas y aspira a todo pulmón. Cajasol, Sevilla, 2010.

ROSADO, MP & MP. http://mprosado.blogspot.com/

Simon Starling’s work can be described as an intensive quest that involves travel, research and the possibility of making connections between different places, objects and historical and cultural circumstances. Starling’s unique and highly distinctive ideas are as humorous as they are erudite and he undertakes specific projects in relation to particular contexts. His trips, the importance of which are equal to or greater than the final destination or end result, reveal hidden relationships, submerged narratives and stories that involve the transformation of one object or substance into another. Starling literally and metaphorically juxtaposes different structures and dynamics. He reveals connections between different times and places. His investigations are, as their very etymology suggests, routes “in pursuit of a mark” or “in search of a clue.” In Starling’s thinking and in his working procedures one step follows another and eacha discovery leads on to a new connection. As in a laboratory, the margin of error is part of the process itself. Like a chain reaction, new references or relationships come into being and contribute to establishing new ways of looking, thinking and acting.

At the end of all this research the tale appears. Starling is an investigator, a traveller and also a narrator. The texts and books that accompany his works are an intrinsic part of them, while the data that he brings to light is essential in helping us to come closer to the process and the connections that he establishes. The relationship between narrative and sculpture is constantly renegotiated and explored. Narratives thus accompany works imbued with a powerful presence in the exhibition space. His projects take the form of installations involving elegantly made objects, photographs, films and books. Starling combines and mixes technical strategies in the same way that he plays with the cultural baggage that he brings to bear as a whole on the activity.

Changes of scale

The exhibitions that Simon Starling is presenting at the Contemporary Arte Centre of Málaga and at Tate St Ives have the same starting point: direct intervention on the architecture of the two institutions with the aim of articulating a group of works that turn around the ideas of change of scale, miniaturisation and magnification, the transfer of digital data into a physical or sculptural form, and, in the reverse direction, the translation of real form into data. The two exhibitions are complementary and in both cases the relationship with the place is modified. The notion of history also plays an important role, referring to recent political and architectrural histories in the case of the new work created for Málaga, and to the ancient geological resources that created Cornwall’s economic base as a mining region, as well as the town of St Ives more immediate cultural history as an important international modernist art colony.

At Tate St Ives, Starling begins by confronting two different and geographically remote institutions. In the Tate’s building he is creating an exact 1:1 scale reproduction of a gallery space from the Pier Arts Centre in Orkney, Scotland. Both Tate St Ives and the Pier Arts Centre overlook the sea, one at the very Northerly tip of the British Isles and one at the far West, and both have a strong relationship to the 20th century artists colony in St Ives . A couple of years ago Starling showed his slide work Autoxylopyrocycloboros (2006) at the Pier Arts Centre. The creation of that work involved sailing on Loch Long in Scotland in a small, “customised” steam boat that was fuelled by the wood of the boat itself until it was finally reduced to a minimum and sunk. On the one hand, the work was inspired by the culture of protest against nuclear submarines, which are frequently to be seen in the waters off this area. On the other, it constitutes a good example of the artist’s sense of humour, which is often subtly expressed but which is certainly present in his work and which at times comes close to that of Tom and Jerry cartoons or the Danish artist Peter Land2. The reconstruction at the Tate of the Orkney gallery creates a spectacular collapsing together of these two disparate spaces, with the replica room appearing – in the curved, glass-fronted gallery space at Tate St Ives – like a kind of ship-in-a-bottle. The work follows on from a number of other architectural sculptures Starling has made over the last few years that often revist an historic narrative or story, but in this case it quite literally re-presents and reinvestigates a piece of his own ‘recent history’. Autoxylopyrocycloboros is again installed in the space, exactly as it was, accompanied now by one other work, a painting of a steam boat by the St Ives based fisherman and artist Alfred Wallis. Executed in St Ives in around 1934, the painting is now part of the collection of the Pier Arts Centre, returning to St Ives within the ‘hull’ of the replicated gallery space, set adrift from its usual place. The result is the creation of a number of submerged narratives, of a double-loop type, in which each of the elements and situations appear as related.

The starting point for the principal work in the exhibition in Málaga, 1:1, 1:10, 1:100 (2010), is the reality of the building that houses the Centre, the former Wholesale Market, which is a construction of straight lines and cubic forms that was adapted to the triangular form of the site. The main exhibition gallery emphasises the triangular form of the museums’s ground-plan and Starling makes full use of this fact by exhibiting a partial architectural model of the Centre. In addition, and in the same gallery, he shows a model of the museum on a smaller scale. Finally, he proposes building a new one, but this time using materials derived from the construction of the Centre itself and taken from some of its walls. The idea of using the museum’s own walls is, as Starling noted in a conversation last October: “A way of denuding the museum in order to reveal the Fascist-type architecture of the end of the 1930s concealed beneath it. It is no more than a playful way of speaking about the amnesia induced by the new walls and panels that cover the museum’s front façade.”

Starling’s new model incorporates the model of the museum, which is not visible and is located “enclosed within the new model” and almost buried in the manner of a mausoleum. Like a set of Russian dolls, the result is the creation of a space that is a hybrid between the model and the building itself, as a result of which the museum houses its own model and, at the same time, generates another one from its own materials in a sort of loop of scales, materials and different functions. As Sean Lynch noted in a text on the exhibition that Simon Starling held in Limerick,2 Starling’s work relates to the ideas of the principal characters in Flann O’Brien’s book The Third Policeman (1967). The book, with its interest in atomic theory (it focuses, for example, on the atomic theory that proposes the progressive hybridization of the cyclist and the bicycle through material transformation), features a series of somewhat peculiar characters ranging from an eccentric scientist to a man condemned to death, and uses them to discuss the way the world is constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed. One of these characters, a policeman who enjoys craft activities in his spare time, makes a small wooden box that contains another identical one inside it and so on up to twenty-nine boxes, of which only thirteen are visible.

Modifying gestures

Starling’s project relating to the CAC Málaga and Tate St Ives buildings has given rise to a group of works that focus on the notion of particles or atoms and which are based on the idea of the transfer of an image’s data or codes into physical or sculptural form, or vice versa. One example is Particle Projection (Loop) (2007). As in most of Starling’s works, the starting point lies in the context. In this case the project was conceived in relation to the inauguration of the Wiels Art Centre in Brussels, which is located in an old distillery. Starling appropriated two references from Belgian culture, which, in characteristic fashion, he ultimately linked up: a famous building from the 1950s and an artist who was a pioneering and fundamental figure for an entire current of subsequent artistic practices based on “institutional criticism.” From the starting point of all these references, which he used as his working material, Starling produced a new image of a technology on the point of disappearing.

The references and their interconnections in themselves constituted a story that needs to be explained here. In 1957, the artist Marcel Broodthaers was employed as a labourer on the Atomium building designed by André Waterkeyn for the 1958 Brussels International Fair. The design of the building took the form of a schematic representation of a metal crystal, the abstract symbol of the concept of an atom. Broodthaers recorded the construction of the pavilion in a series of photographs that were subsequently published in the newspaper Le Patriote Illustré. When the Atomium was restored, fifty years after it was built, and the deteriorated aluminium was replaced with new triangular panels, a series of black and white photographs was taken that exactly reproduced the one taken by Broodthaers at the time of construction. In a Berlin chemical lab, one of the negatives of the photographs documenting the restoration of the Atomium was stripped of its layer of gel to reveal the silver particles of the developing agent. Seen under an electronic microscope, the fragments of these particles had a spongy, spectral appearance that created a different type of “architecture”, filled with labyrinthine structures in constant mutation. One of these particles was then returned to the photographic film, which was considerably enlarged, creating a suggestion of ghostliness.

Particle Projection (Loop) can be presented both as a film projection and as an object in the form of an installation in two display cases, with the 35mm film and the blown-up contacts of the original photographs, expressing this idea of a loop. In this sense, Starling conceives of his works not so much as unique but rather as a constellation of objects, texts, images, books and even talks, which are in some way connected to the main body of the work.

Morphological translations. The case of Henry Moore

Translation is another key concept for Starling. Working close to the global vision of artist Antoni Muntadas’ “on translation”, Starling transforms or translates one thing into another, from language to codes, from science to technology, from the visible to the invisible, etc. Above all, he is interested in what happens during the process, what changes, what is lost and what appears, and the relationships that are established. Pursuing the idea of data transfer, Project for a Meeting (Chicago) (2010) is a new work in which Starling returns to his interest in the art of Henry Moore, one of the most celebrated sculptors of the modern movement. Allusions and references to modern art are habitual in Starling’s projects. On the one hand they act as witness to the failure of utopias, and on the other, they express the recovery the nostalgic impulse that underpinned them. Project for a Meeting (Chicago) consists of a series of three uranotypes and is part of a body of research on the history of two very similar sculptures by Henry Moore, Atom Piece and Nuclear Energy, which are located in two strikingly contradictory contexts: the place where the first nuclear reactor was built at the University of Chicago – the starting-place for the so-called Manhattan Project to develop atomic bombs for use in war – and the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, the latter located in the city that suffered the terrible consequences of the atomic bomb. The series of three images created by Starling offers a fictitious union between these two works, which are almost identical apart from their size. To close this circle of interconnections, the uranotypes were made using an almost obsolete developing process whose principal constituent is uranium oxide.

The relationship between Atom Piece and Nuclear Energy is a significant one. Atom Piece was a working model for Nuclear Energy. Moore himself explained how he devised the project: “It’s a rather strange thing really but I’d already done the idea for this sculpture before Professor McNeill and his colleagues from the University of Chicago came to see me on Sunday morning to tell me about the whole proposition. They told me (which I’d only vaguely known) that Fermi, the Italian nuclear physicist, started or really made the first successful controlled nuclear fission in a temporary building. I think it was a squash court – a wooden building – which from the outside looked entirely unlike where a thing of such an important nature might take place. But this experiment was carried on in secret and it meant that by being successful Man was able to control this huge force for peaceful purposes as well as destructive ones. They came to me to tell me that they thought were such an important event in history took place ought to be marked and they wondered whether I would do a sculpture which would stand on the spot.”3

This is not the first time that Starling has been interested in the work and artistic personality of Henry Moore. In Silver Particle/Bronze (After Henry Moore) (2008) he took a small black and white photograph taken by Moore himself of his sculpture Reclining Figure No. 4. Starling made a circular cut in the photograph, extracting the image of one of the photograph’s silver particles. For this project, Starling again used an electron microscope and software designed to build models from multiple images made from different angles. The detail was scanned and manipulated to produce a 3-d model that was translated into the form of a sculpture that was extremely similar to Moore’s own. In fact, Moore’s working method consisted of making small models that his assistants would enlarge to create his sculptures.

The translation from photography to sculpture using a chain of reproduction refers to the materiality of the work, as Starling sees photography not just in terms of its importance as image, memory base and document but also as a receptacle of metallic particles or, as the artist has noted on various occasions, “as a field of potential sculptures”.

Starling’s interest in Moore undoubtedly relates to the latter’s status as sculptor of the modern age, but also to his own research on artistic institutions. Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima) (2010), is a work that belongs to a three-part exhibition that Starling is currently preparing for the Modern Institute, Glasgow, the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. In it, Starling is undertaking in-depth research into the connection between Moore and the Cold War. Project for a Masquerade consists of the presentation of nine characters, subjects of the Eboshi-ori, a traditional work of Japanese Noh theatre. Six of them are represented by a wooden mask, two of them by bronze masks, and another by a hat. The work tells the story of a young nobleman who, with the help of a hat maker, disguises himself in order to escape and start a new life in eastern Japan. In this story of personal reinvention, Starling adds figures associated with Moore within the context of the Cold War in order to look at the double life of Atom Piece, which was first made as an independent sculpture but which subsequently acted as the model for Nuclear Energy and which had to undergo a change of name, in part because the word “piece” in the title could be confused with “peace”, a term far removed from its nuclear context and from the Cold War.

The characters in Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima) include Henry Moore, who is the hat maker; Enrico Fermi as the messenger; Joseph Hirshhorn as Kumasaka, an opportunist bandit; James Bond as the gold merchant; Anthony Blunt as the hat maker’s wife; and Atom-Piece-Nuclear Energy as Ushikawa, the young nobleman. The mixture of real and fictitious characters and the fact that the principal role is taken by a sculpture, as well as the female role played by Anthony Blunt, are all indicative of Starling’s refined sense of humour. Starling had established connections on earlier occasions between Moore and the Cold War when he analysed his relationship with Anthony Blunt, a double agent who worked for the Soviet NKVD and for the British MI5 service. Blunt was also well known in the art world as a professor of art history at London University, an art critic, champion of Moore’s work and director of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Through Project for a Meeting (Chicago) and Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima) Starling analysed Moore’s role as the creator of an homage to the father of nuclear energy, while bearing in mind that he was one of the public sponsors of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Tightening the loop still further, at that same period Moore sold around fifty sculptures to Joseph Hirshhorn, a businessman and collector who described himself as “Mr Opportunity” and who made his fortune in petrol, gold and uranium prospecting in Canada in the 1960s.

The physical existence of photography

In another recent work, 1:300 (After Wilhelm Wagenfeld) (2010), Starling returns to his interest in photography as an emotional receptor and also as an element with which to explore its physical existence through the elements that create the images and which are presented in 3-D. The work consists of a series of hand-blown black glass balls, a series of offset prints, and pins for hanging the photographs. The images depict modernist glass objects designed by Bauhaus and inspired by Modernist designers. The size of the glass balls relates to that of the half-tone dots punctured by the pin with which the images on hung on the wall above. Starling’s work arose as a consequence of a large installation made by him in Pouges-les-Eaux, France, in 2009, entitled La Source (demi-teinte). The venue in Pouges-les-Eaux was an old spa where water with health-giving properties was bottled. In this installation Starling presented a light-box that showed a blown-up reproduction of an early 20th-century photograph of the floor of the building where he was now exhibiting, covered with carefully lined up rows of bottles. The workers who carried out the bottling could be seen in the background of the image. Starling made a circular cut in the image. In addition, inside the building he constructed a walkway that ran along one of the narrow corridors, while a series of ramps connected the walkways to the stairs leading to the upper rooms. On the grey concrete floor he arranged 1,036 black glass balls that were hand-made in six different sizes. The effect was that of a huge mesh that produced a distorted vision of the architecture of the building itself. The connection between the black glass balls and the original image was as direct as it was remote: the circle that Starling had cut out of the photograph was blown up to the scale of the building so that each of the dots of the printing was “translated” into its corresponding black glass ball. Seen from the upper balcony, the glass spheres could be read as sections of two of the bottles and a fragment of the floor from the image in the light box.

La Source was an extremely complex project. 1:300 (After Wilhelm Wagenfeld) is a reduced-scale version of the same project that that refers in a more precise manner to the ambiguous space between mass manufacture and bespoke craftsmanship

Stones, evolution and dissemination

In the case of Archaeopteryx Lithographica (2008) connections were established between theories of evolution and a type of technology of reproduction that contributed to their dissemination. The work comprises two complementary elements: a sculpture and a group of gelatin silver prints. The sculpture, “Archaeopteryx Lithographica” takes its name from one of the most important fossils ever found. Through this work Starling explores a key moment in the 19th century when the growth of offset printing had a major influence on the dissemination of theories of evolution which, through this newly discovered fossil, had been able to establish a relationship between dinosaurs and birds.

Archaeopteryx thus became a lithographic series consisting of six lithographs that link the various realities of the image: a lithographic reproduction of the text photographs, the photograph of the lithograph of the fossils on the lithographic stone, the lithographic impression of the photograph of the fossils, etc.

Journeys through history and technique

D1-Z1 (22,686,575:1), made in 2009, should be singled out with regard to the above-mentioned idea of transferring data from one medium to another and even from one dimension to another.The work refers to what was considered to be the world’s first programmable computer, the Z1. It was designed in 1936 by the engineer and artist Konrad Zuse (1910-1995) and occupied an entire room. With 172 bytes of memory and the ability to add, subtract, multiply and divide, the Z1 was privately financed and literally home-made in Zuse’s parents’ apartment in Berlin. Completed in 1938, it was “programmed” from a punched tape fed into a reader. Zuse punched his programmes on 35mm photographic film.

D1-Z1 is a 30-second long sequence showing an image of the machine itself in action. As is sometimes the case with Starling, the laborious effort involved in his working methods seems out of proportion to the results, while on other occasions these methods seem to come close to a critique of the pressure to achieve dramatic effects and to save time characteristic of the present day. The images in D1-Z1 (222,686,575:1) are thus generated using animation technology, including surface-rendering programmes produced in Berlin. Creating this simple, 30-second animated sequence, which depicts the punched film reader (a small part of the huge machine) required 3,992,837,240 bytes of information, in other words, more than 22 million times the memory of the Z1. This virtual, computer-generated reconstruction was then transferred onto 35mm film and was shown on another celebrated piece of mid-century technology, a Dresden D1 projector, which had been adapted for loop projection.The projected image, which is slightly blurred, shows the machine itself in action, with the film moving through the it. As hypnotic as it is formalist, the work is nothing less than an homage to Zuse’s perseverance, which is close to Starling’s own. It also involves a humorous approach to a way of doing things which is far remote from present day practices. In fact, all the machines and techniques brought together in these projects, from Zuse’s computer, to film developing with uranium, or the use of artisan, hand blown glass in the modern day, are used by Starling as elements in a reflection on a contemporary reality that seems to us far more de-materialised.

Using this approach, Starling creates a journey between two different contexts: historical and technical. He combines high technology with low technology to produce an image of the first prototype of a programmable calculator. Starling’s interest in the image starts from the relationship that it could establish with the machine that reproduces it, with a desire to show the mechanism, what it represents and its historical and social connotations.
Like another, earlier work, Wilhelm Noak oHG (2006), in which a 35mm film projects the construction of a staircase while the actual film gradually rolls itself around this same staircase, D1-Z1 (22,686,575:1) documents its own method of creation. In both cases we reencounter the loop in relation to the history of the technique and the support of the film, both of which take on contemporary meaning in a space filled with new implications.

Six degrees of separation

Starling’s working procedure, in which he gradually establishes a chain of connections that might seem theoretically inconceivable, connects to the theory that was proposed in the short story Chains (1929) by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy and popularised in a play by John Guare. Karinthy maintained that anyone in the world could be connected to anyone else through a chain of acquaintances that involves no more than five intermediaries. The six degrees of separation with which Starling’s works not only connect people, but also facts, situations and discoveries.
Three Birds, Seven Stories, Interpolations and Bifurcations (2008) recounts the story of a European architect from whom an Indian maharajah commissioned an ambitious architectural project. In 1929 the young, European educated Maharajah of Indore, Yeshwant Rao Holkar (1908-1961), commissioned the German architect Eckart Muthesius (1904-1989) to design him a palace. The project ultimately become one of the most famous buildings of European Modernism with regard to design and technology and involved the work of leading names such as Le Corbusier, Eileen Grey, Marcel Breuer, Lilly Reich and Constantin Brancusi. The latter designed a Temple of Liberation to house some of his sculptures of birds, but this was never made. The palace also had air conditioning (unusual in India) installed by Heinz Riefenstahl, brother of the famous filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.

Reality and fiction combine in this tapestry of names and contexts and Starling makes reference to the account offered by Muthesius himself, who to some extent “fictionalised” his involvement in the project: when he presented it to a European public he retouched the images, concealing the roof that did not conform to Modernist precepts.

Another project involving journeys is Red Rivers (In Search of the Elusive Okapi) (2009) which offers an account of the expedition undertaken by the zoologist Herbert Lang in the Belgian Congo. The purpose of the trip, which was sponsored by the Natural History Museum in New York, was to look for the okapi, a ruminant similar to a small giraffe. Starling films a canoe trip, taking as his model one of the traditional 19th-century canoes made in North America, which he painted with brown stripes to suggest an okapi. The journey starts in a wooded area (that could almost be the Congo) and ends in the city of New York, presenting a slow transition in which culture takes over from nature. It concludes in the place where Lang’s adventure started, in the Natural History Museum of New York, in front of the diorama in which an okapi is to be seen. Just as Lang took thousands of photographs and recorded the okapi for the first time, developing his prints in an improvised lab in a tent, Starling filmed the photographs of his trip under the red light used in developing rooms. The result is to give the impression that the images have been selected from contact sheets, blown up, and developed, etc.

The film refers to American history and its complex relationship with Europe, as well as to the power of photography as a tool of communication and knowledge. The reddish tone that brings to mind the safety light in developing rooms and which turns the river into one of the “red rivers” of the title, also recalls geo-political tensions in the context of colonialism.

Consumption and its paradoxes

Another work that connects to and dismantles locations and contexts is the installation The Long Ton (2009). It consists of two large blocks of marble, one of which is suspended from the other through a system of pulleys. The larger of the two comes from China and weighs over a tonne, while the other block, which is made of Carrara marble, is its absolutely exact replica although it weighs only a quarter of the Chinese one. Their similarity does not extend to their value, as despite having travelled thousands of kilometres, the Chinese block is worth the same as the one from Carrara, even though the Italian one is significantly lighter and smaller.

One Ton II (2005) also draws attention to the contradictions and nonsensical elements within modern-day global consumption. The concept of this work focuses on the amount of energy needed to produce a small amount of platinum. A tonne of the mineral extracted from an open-cast mine in South Africa, shown in Starling’s photographs, was needed to produce the platinum used to hand develop the five platinotype prints that make up this work. Once again Starling refers to the complexity of the modern world. Among the uses of platinum, which is a highly prized precious metal, is that of catalyser in hydrogen fuel cells, which are one of the most promising sources of alternative energy of the future. In addition, platinum is used in the platinotype method of photographic development, widely employed between 1860 and 1920 but now obsolete.

One Ton II is closely related to Exposition, the work made by Starling for the Espai 13 of the Fundació Miró in Barcelona. Here, the artist juxtaposed cutting-edge contemporary technology and the evolution of the modern movement, taking as his starting point the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition, an event that was a showcase for both German technology and design of the period, with magnificent displays designed by Lilly Reich. Another key element in Exposition was once again platinum, which has a double role in this work; firstly in the photographs on the wall that show some of the designs by Lilly Reich for the display on German engineering at the 1929 Exhibition, and which were printed using the platinotype technique; and on the other, in the way these photographs are lit, using a hydrogen fuel cell, in which platinum is a key element as it acts as a catalyser that enables the necessary reaction between hydrogen and oxygen to come about, resulting in the production of electric current and a residual amount of water.

In the exhibitions in Malaga and St Ives, Simon Starling has focused on recent history and its connections with the present; on the Fascist past of the architecture of the Contemporary Art Centre of Málaga; on the conflictive past of the Cold War; on the past expressed through obsolete technologies; on St Ives’ past as a mining town and a cultural colony; and on the artist’s own recent past through, for example, the re-presentation of Autoxylopyrocycloboros in a full size replica of the gallery in which it was previously shown.

Whether constructing architectural models using material from the building itself, inserting one building inside another, magnifying small particles, transforming data into 3-D objects, making technological processes visible, rediscovering epic undertakings and journeys, making efforts out of all proportion to the results obtained or recalling bizarre stories, Simon Starling has evolved a conceptual approach and a working method based on journeys, routes, geographical shifts, translations, transformations, superimpositions, reproductions, loops and turns, and which mix genres, time-frames, techniques, humour, gravity and poetry. As the jury that awarded him the 2005 Turner Prize noted, Starling is outstanding for his: “[…] unique ability to create poetic narratives that draw together a wide variety of cultural, political and historical references.” Through his deconstructions, reconstructions and connections, Starling reveals the complexity of the real, the jumbled, crowded nature of the world in which we exist and its relationship to the most recent past.

1. In the case of the Tate, it was originally built in St Ives to celebrate and represent the Tate’s collection of works by artists associated with the colony, including Barbara Hepworth, Naum Gabo, Ben Nicholson, Patrick Heron and Peter Lanyon. In the case of the Pier, it houses the collection of Margaret Gardiner, a patron and collector who was a frequent visitor to St Ives through the middle of the last century, and who bought many of the works in her collecton from the artists living and working there.

2. The Danish artist Peter Land made a video entitled The Lake (2000) in which he dressed as a hunter and presented himself about to shoot duck from a boat. His first shot made a hole in the boat, which slowly sunk.

3. Lynch, Sean, “Simon Starling and assorted notes on The Atomic Theory”, in Concrete Light, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick, 2008, p. 11

4. Henry Moore quoted in Art Journal, New York, Spring 19, p. 286.

Simon Starling’s work can be described as an intensive quest that involves travel, research and the possibility of making connections between different places, objects and historical and cultural circumstances. Starling’s unique and highly distinctive ideas are as humorous as they are erudite and he undertakes specific projects in relation to particular contexts. His trips, the importance of which are equal to or greater than the final destination or end result, reveal hidden relationships, submerged narratives and stories that involve the transformation of one object or substance into another. Starling literally and metaphorically juxtaposes different structures and dynamics. He reveals connections between different times and places. His investigations are, as their very etymology suggests, routes “in pursuit of a mark” or “in search of a clue.” In Starling’s thinking and in his working procedures one step follows another and eacha discovery leads on to a new connection. As in a laboratory, the margin of error is part of the process itself. Like a chain reaction, new references or relationships come into being and contribute to establishing new ways of looking, thinking and acting.

At the end of all this research the tale appears. Starling is an investigator, a traveller and also a narrator. The texts and books that accompany his works are an intrinsic part of them, while the data that he brings to light is essential in helping us to come closer to the process and the connections that he establishes. The relationship between narrative and sculpture is constantly renegotiated and explored. Narratives thus accompany works imbued with a powerful presence in the exhibition space. His projects take the form of installations involving elegantly made objects, photographs, films and books. Starling combines and mixes technical strategies in the same way that he plays with the cultural baggage that he brings to bear as a whole on the activity.

Changes of scale

The exhibitions that Simon Starling is presenting at the Contemporary Arte Centre of Málaga and at Tate St Ives have the same starting point: direct intervention on the architecture of the two institutions with the aim of articulating a group of works that turn around the ideas of change of scale, miniaturisation and magnification, the transfer of digital data into a physical or sculptural form, and, in the reverse direction, the translation of real form into data. The two exhibitions are complementary and in both cases the relationship with the place is modified. The notion of history also plays an important role, referring to recent political and architectrural histories in the case of the new work created for Málaga, and to the ancient geological resources that created Cornwall’s economic base as a mining region, as well as the town of St Ives more immediate cultural history as an important international modernist art colony.

At Tate St Ives, Starling begins by confronting two different and geographically remote institutions. In the Tate’s building he is creating an exact 1:1 scale reproduction of a gallery space from the Pier Arts Centre in Orkney, Scotland. Both Tate St Ives and the Pier Arts Centre overlook the sea, one at the very Northerly tip of the British Isles and one at the far West, and both have a strong relationship to the 20th century artists colony in St Ives . A couple of years ago Starling showed his slide work Autoxylopyrocycloboros (2006) at the Pier Arts Centre. The creation of that work involved sailing on Loch Long in Scotland in a small, “customised” steam boat that was fuelled by the wood of the boat itself until it was finally reduced to a minimum and sunk. On the one hand, the work was inspired by the culture of protest against nuclear submarines, which are frequently to be seen in the waters off this area. On the other, it constitutes a good example of the artist’s sense of humour, which is often subtly expressed but which is certainly present in his work and which at times comes close to that of Tom and Jerry cartoons or the Danish artist Peter Land2. The reconstruction at the Tate of the Orkney gallery creates a spectacular collapsing together of these two disparate spaces, with the replica room appearing – in the curved, glass-fronted gallery space at Tate St Ives – like a kind of ship-in-a-bottle. The work follows on from a number of other architectural sculptures Starling has made over the last few years that often revist an historic narrative or story, but in this case it quite literally re-presents and reinvestigates a piece of his own ‘recent history’. Autoxylopyrocycloboros is again installed in the space, exactly as it was, accompanied now by one other work, a painting of a steam boat by the St Ives based fisherman and artist Alfred Wallis. Executed in St Ives in around 1934, the painting is now part of the collection of the Pier Arts Centre, returning to St Ives within the ‘hull’ of the replicated gallery space, set adrift from its usual place. The result is the creation of a number of submerged narratives, of a double-loop type, in which each of the elements and situations appear as related.

The starting point for the principal work in the exhibition in Málaga, 1:1, 1:10, 1:100 (2010), is the reality of the building that houses the Centre, the former Wholesale Market, which is a construction of straight lines and cubic forms that was adapted to the triangular form of the site. The main exhibition gallery emphasises the triangular form of the museums’s ground-plan and Starling makes full use of this fact by exhibiting a partial architectural model of the Centre. In addition, and in the same gallery, he shows a model of the museum on a smaller scale. Finally, he proposes building a new one, but this time using materials derived from the construction of the Centre itself and taken from some of its walls. The idea of using the museum’s own walls is, as Starling noted in a conversation last October: “A way of denuding the museum in order to reveal the Fascist-type architecture of the end of the 1930s concealed beneath it. It is no more than a playful way of speaking about the amnesia induced by the new walls and panels that cover the museum’s front façade.”

Starling’s new model incorporates the model of the museum, which is not visible and is located “enclosed within the new model” and almost buried in the manner of a mausoleum. Like a set of Russian dolls, the result is the creation of a space that is a hybrid between the model and the building itself, as a result of which the museum houses its own model and, at the same time, generates another one from its own materials in a sort of loop of scales, materials and different functions. As Sean Lynch noted in a text on the exhibition that Simon Starling held in Limerick,2 Starling’s work relates to the ideas of the principal characters in Flann O’Brien’s book The Third Policeman (1967). The book, with its interest in atomic theory (it focuses, for example, on the atomic theory that proposes the progressive hybridization of the cyclist and the bicycle through material transformation), features a series of somewhat peculiar characters ranging from an eccentric scientist to a man condemned to death, and uses them to discuss the way the world is constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed. One of these characters, a policeman who enjoys craft activities in his spare time, makes a small wooden box that contains another identical one inside it and so on up to twenty-nine boxes, of which only thirteen are visible.

Modifying gestures

Starling’s project relating to the CAC Málaga and Tate St Ives buildings has given rise to a group of works that focus on the notion of particles or atoms and which are based on the idea of the transfer of an image’s data or codes into physical or sculptural form, or vice versa. One example is Particle Projection (Loop) (2007). As in most of Starling’s works, the starting point lies in the context. In this case the project was conceived in relation to the inauguration of the Wiels Art Centre in Brussels, which is located in an old distillery. Starling appropriated two references from Belgian culture, which, in characteristic fashion, he ultimately linked up: a famous building from the 1950s and an artist who was a pioneering and fundamental figure for an entire current of subsequent artistic practices based on “institutional criticism.” From the starting point of all these references, which he used as his working material, Starling produced a new image of a technology on the point of disappearing.

The references and their interconnections in themselves constituted a story that needs to be explained here. In 1957, the artist Marcel Broodthaers was employed as a labourer on the Atomium building designed by André Waterkeyn for the 1958 Brussels International Fair. The design of the building took the form of a schematic representation of a metal crystal, the abstract symbol of the concept of an atom. Broodthaers recorded the construction of the pavilion in a series of photographs that were subsequently published in the newspaper Le Patriote Illustré. When the Atomium was restored, fifty years after it was built, and the deteriorated aluminium was replaced with new triangular panels, a series of black and white photographs was taken that exactly reproduced the one taken by Broodthaers at the time of construction. In a Berlin chemical lab, one of the negatives of the photographs documenting the restoration of the Atomium was stripped of its layer of gel to reveal the silver particles of the developing agent. Seen under an electronic microscope, the fragments of these particles had a spongy, spectral appearance that created a different type of “architecture”, filled with labyrinthine structures in constant mutation. One of these particles was then returned to the photographic film, which was considerably enlarged, creating a suggestion of ghostliness.

Particle Projection (Loop) can be presented both as a film projection and as an object in the form of an installation in two display cases, with the 35mm film and the blown-up contacts of the original photographs, expressing this idea of a loop. In this sense, Starling conceives of his works not so much as unique but rather as a constellation of objects, texts, images, books and even talks, which are in some way connected to the main body of the work.

Morphological translations. The case of Henry Moore

Translation is another key concept for Starling. Working close to the global vision of artist Antoni Muntadas’ “on translation”, Starling transforms or translates one thing into another, from language to codes, from science to technology, from the visible to the invisible, etc. Above all, he is interested in what happens during the process, what changes, what is lost and what appears, and the relationships that are established. Pursuing the idea of data transfer, Project for a Meeting (Chicago) (2010) is a new work in which Starling returns to his interest in the art of Henry Moore, one of the most celebrated sculptors of the modern movement. Allusions and references to modern art are habitual in Starling’s projects. On the one hand they act as witness to the failure of utopias, and on the other, they express the recovery the nostalgic impulse that underpinned them. Project for a Meeting (Chicago) consists of a series of three uranotypes and is part of a body of research on the history of two very similar sculptures by Henry Moore, Atom Piece and Nuclear Energy, which are located in two strikingly contradictory contexts: the place where the first nuclear reactor was built at the University of Chicago – the starting-place for the so-called Manhattan Project to develop atomic bombs for use in war – and the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, the latter located in the city that suffered the terrible consequences of the atomic bomb. The series of three images created by Starling offers a fictitious union between these two works, which are almost identical apart from their size. To close this circle of interconnections, the uranotypes were made using an almost obsolete developing process whose principal constituent is uranium oxide.

The relationship between Atom Piece and Nuclear Energy is a significant one. Atom Piece was a working model for Nuclear Energy. Moore himself explained how he devised the project: “It’s a rather strange thing really but I’d already done the idea for this sculpture before Professor McNeill and his colleagues from the University of Chicago came to see me on Sunday morning to tell me about the whole proposition. They told me (which I’d only vaguely known) that Fermi, the Italian nuclear physicist, started or really made the first successful controlled nuclear fission in a temporary building. I think it was a squash court – a wooden building – which from the outside looked entirely unlike where a thing of such an important nature might take place. But this experiment was carried on in secret and it meant that by being successful Man was able to control this huge force for peaceful purposes as well as destructive ones. They came to me to tell me that they thought were such an important event in history took place ought to be marked and they wondered whether I would do a sculpture which would stand on the spot.”3

This is not the first time that Starling has been interested in the work and artistic personality of Henry Moore. In Silver Particle/Bronze (After Henry Moore) (2008) he took a small black and white photograph taken by Moore himself of his sculpture Reclining Figure No. 4. Starling made a circular cut in the photograph, extracting the image of one of the photograph’s silver particles. For this project, Starling again used an electron microscope and software designed to build models from multiple images made from different angles. The detail was scanned and manipulated to produce a 3-d model that was translated into the form of a sculpture that was extremely similar to Moore’s own. In fact, Moore’s working method consisted of making small models that his assistants would enlarge to create his sculptures.

The translation from photography to sculpture using a chain of reproduction refers to the materiality of the work, as Starling sees photography not just in terms of its importance as image, memory base and document but also as a receptacle of metallic particles or, as the artist has noted on various occasions, “as a field of potential sculptures”.

Starling’s interest in Moore undoubtedly relates to the latter’s status as sculptor of the modern age, but also to his own research on artistic institutions. Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima) (2010), is a work that belongs to a three-part exhibition that Starling is currently preparing for the Modern Institute, Glasgow, the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. In it, Starling is undertaking in-depth research into the connection between Moore and the Cold War. Project for a Masquerade consists of the presentation of nine characters, subjects of the Eboshi-ori, a traditional work of Japanese Noh theatre. Six of them are represented by a wooden mask, two of them by bronze masks, and another by a hat. The work tells the story of a young nobleman who, with the help of a hat maker, disguises himself in order to escape and start a new life in eastern Japan. In this story of personal reinvention, Starling adds figures associated with Moore within the context of the Cold War in order to look at the double life of Atom Piece, which was first made as an independent sculpture but which subsequently acted as the model for Nuclear Energy and which had to undergo a change of name, in part because the word “piece” in the title could be confused with “peace”, a term far removed from its nuclear context and from the Cold War.

The characters in Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima) include Henry Moore, who is the hat maker; Enrico Fermi as the messenger; Joseph Hirshhorn as Kumasaka, an opportunist bandit; James Bond as the gold merchant; Anthony Blunt as the hat maker’s wife; and Atom-Piece-Nuclear Energy as Ushikawa, the young nobleman. The mixture of real and fictitious characters and the fact that the principal role is taken by a sculpture, as well as the female role played by Anthony Blunt, are all indicative of Starling’s refined sense of humour. Starling had established connections on earlier occasions between Moore and the Cold War when he analysed his relationship with Anthony Blunt, a double agent who worked for the Soviet NKVD and for the British MI5 service. Blunt was also well known in the art world as a professor of art history at London University, an art critic, champion of Moore’s work and director of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Through Project for a Meeting (Chicago) and Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima) Starling analysed Moore’s role as the creator of an homage to the father of nuclear energy, while bearing in mind that he was one of the public sponsors of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Tightening the loop still further, at that same period Moore sold around fifty sculptures to Joseph Hirshhorn, a businessman and collector who described himself as “Mr Opportunity” and who made his fortune in petrol, gold and uranium prospecting in Canada in the 1960s.

The physical existence of photography

In another recent work, 1:300 (After Wilhelm Wagenfeld) (2010), Starling returns to his interest in photography as an emotional receptor and also as an element with which to explore its physical existence through the elements that create the images and which are presented in 3-D. The work consists of a series of hand-blown black glass balls, a series of offset prints, and pins for hanging the photographs. The images depict modernist glass objects designed by Bauhaus and inspired by Modernist designers. The size of the glass balls relates to that of the half-tone dots punctured by the pin with which the images on hung on the wall above. Starling’s work arose as a consequence of a large installation made by him in Pouges-les-Eaux, France, in 2009, entitled La Source (demi-teinte). The venue in Pouges-les-Eaux was an old spa where water with health-giving properties was bottled. In this installation Starling presented a light-box that showed a blown-up reproduction of an early 20th-century photograph of the floor of the building where he was now exhibiting, covered with carefully lined up rows of bottles. The workers who carried out the bottling could be seen in the background of the image. Starling made a circular cut in the image. In addition, inside the building he constructed a walkway that ran along one of the narrow corridors, while a series of ramps connected the walkways to the stairs leading to the upper rooms. On the grey concrete floor he arranged 1,036 black glass balls that were hand-made in six different sizes. The effect was that of a huge mesh that produced a distorted vision of the architecture of the building itself. The connection between the black glass balls and the original image was as direct as it was remote: the circle that Starling had cut out of the photograph was blown up to the scale of the building so that each of the dots of the printing was “translated” into its corresponding black glass ball. Seen from the upper balcony, the glass spheres could be read as sections of two of the bottles and a fragment of the floor from the image in the light box.

La Source was an extremely complex project. 1:300 (After Wilhelm Wagenfeld) is a reduced-scale version of the same project that that refers in a more precise manner to the ambiguous space between mass manufacture and bespoke craftsmanship

Stones, evolution and dissemination

In the case of Archaeopteryx Lithographica (2008) connections were established between theories of evolution and a type of technology of reproduction that contributed to their dissemination. The work comprises two complementary elements: a sculpture and a group of gelatin silver prints. The sculpture, “Archaeopteryx Lithographica” takes its name from one of the most important fossils ever found. Through this work Starling explores a key moment in the 19th century when the growth of offset printing had a major influence on the dissemination of theories of evolution which, through this newly discovered fossil, had been able to establish a relationship between dinosaurs and birds.

Archaeopteryx thus became a lithographic series consisting of six lithographs that link the various realities of the image: a lithographic reproduction of the text photographs, the photograph of the lithograph of the fossils on the lithographic stone, the lithographic impression of the photograph of the fossils, etc.

Journeys through history and technique

D1-Z1 (22,686,575:1), made in 2009, should be singled out with regard to the above-mentioned idea of transferring data from one medium to another and even from one dimension to another.The work refers to what was considered to be the world’s first programmable computer, the Z1. It was designed in 1936 by the engineer and artist Konrad Zuse (1910-1995) and occupied an entire room. With 172 bytes of memory and the ability to add, subtract, multiply and divide, the Z1 was privately financed and literally home-made in Zuse’s parents’ apartment in Berlin. Completed in 1938, it was “programmed” from a punched tape fed into a reader. Zuse punched his programmes on 35mm photographic film.

D1-Z1 is a 30-second long sequence showing an image of the machine itself in action. As is sometimes the case with Starling, the laborious effort involved in his working methods seems out of proportion to the results, while on other occasions these methods seem to come close to a critique of the pressure to achieve dramatic effects and to save time characteristic of the present day. The images in D1-Z1 (222,686,575:1) are thus generated using animation technology, including surface-rendering programmes produced in Berlin. Creating this simple, 30-second animated sequence, which depicts the punched film reader (a small part of the huge machine) required 3,992,837,240 bytes of information, in other words, more than 22 million times the memory of the Z1. This virtual, computer-generated reconstruction was then transferred onto 35mm film and was shown on another celebrated piece of mid-century technology, a Dresden D1 projector, which had been adapted for loop projection.The projected image, which is slightly blurred, shows the machine itself in action, with the film moving through the it. As hypnotic as it is formalist, the work is nothing less than an homage to Zuse’s perseverance, which is close to Starling’s own. It also involves a humorous approach to a way of doing things which is far remote from present day practices. In fact, all the machines and techniques brought together in these projects, from Zuse’s computer, to film developing with uranium, or the use of artisan, hand blown glass in the modern day, are used by Starling as elements in a reflection on a contemporary reality that seems to us far more de-materialised.

Using this approach, Starling creates a journey between two different contexts: historical and technical. He combines high technology with low technology to produce an image of the first prototype of a programmable calculator. Starling’s interest in the image starts from the relationship that it could establish with the machine that reproduces it, with a desire to show the mechanism, what it represents and its historical and social connotations.
Like another, earlier work, Wilhelm Noak oHG (2006), in which a 35mm film projects the construction of a staircase while the actual film gradually rolls itself around this same staircase, D1-Z1 (22,686,575:1) documents its own method of creation. In both cases we reencounter the loop in relation to the history of the technique and the support of the film, both of which take on contemporary meaning in a space filled with new implications.

Six degrees of separation

Starling’s working procedure, in which he gradually establishes a chain of connections that might seem theoretically inconceivable, connects to the theory that was proposed in the short story Chains (1929) by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy and popularised in a play by John Guare. Karinthy maintained that anyone in the world could be connected to anyone else through a chain of acquaintances that involves no more than five intermediaries. The six degrees of separation with which Starling’s works not only connect people, but also facts, situations and discoveries.
Three Birds, Seven Stories, Interpolations and Bifurcations (2008) recounts the story of a European architect from whom an Indian maharajah commissioned an ambitious architectural project. In 1929 the young, European educated Maharajah of Indore, Yeshwant Rao Holkar (1908-1961), commissioned the German architect Eckart Muthesius (1904-1989) to design him a palace. The project ultimately become one of the most famous buildings of European Modernism with regard to design and technology and involved the work of leading names such as Le Corbusier, Eileen Grey, Marcel Breuer, Lilly Reich and Constantin Brancusi. The latter designed a Temple of Liberation to house some of his sculptures of birds, but this was never made. The palace also had air conditioning (unusual in India) installed by Heinz Riefenstahl, brother of the famous filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.

Reality and fiction combine in this tapestry of names and contexts and Starling makes reference to the account offered by Muthesius himself, who to some extent “fictionalised” his involvement in the project: when he presented it to a European public he retouched the images, concealing the roof that did not conform to Modernist precepts.

Another project involving journeys is Red Rivers (In Search of the Elusive Okapi) (2009) which offers an account of the expedition undertaken by the zoologist Herbert Lang in the Belgian Congo. The purpose of the trip, which was sponsored by the Natural History Museum in New York, was to look for the okapi, a ruminant similar to a small giraffe. Starling films a canoe trip, taking as his model one of the traditional 19th-century canoes made in North America, which he painted with brown stripes to suggest an okapi. The journey starts in a wooded area (that could almost be the Congo) and ends in the city of New York, presenting a slow transition in which culture takes over from nature. It concludes in the place where Lang’s adventure started, in the Natural History Museum of New York, in front of the diorama in which an okapi is to be seen. Just as Lang took thousands of photographs and recorded the okapi for the first time, developing his prints in an improvised lab in a tent, Starling filmed the photographs of his trip under the red light used in developing rooms. The result is to give the impression that the images have been selected from contact sheets, blown up, and developed, etc.

The film refers to American history and its complex relationship with Europe, as well as to the power of photography as a tool of communication and knowledge. The reddish tone that brings to mind the safety light in developing rooms and which turns the river into one of the “red rivers” of the title, also recalls geo-political tensions in the context of colonialism.

Consumption and its paradoxes

Another work that connects to and dismantles locations and contexts is the installation The Long Ton (2009). It consists of two large blocks of marble, one of which is suspended from the other through a system of pulleys. The larger of the two comes from China and weighs over a tonne, while the other block, which is made of Carrara marble, is its absolutely exact replica although it weighs only a quarter of the Chinese one. Their similarity does not extend to their value, as despite having travelled thousands of kilometres, the Chinese block is worth the same as the one from Carrara, even though the Italian one is significantly lighter and smaller.

One Ton II (2005) also draws attention to the contradictions and nonsensical elements within modern-day global consumption. The concept of this work focuses on the amount of energy needed to produce a small amount of platinum. A tonne of the mineral extracted from an open-cast mine in South Africa, shown in Starling’s photographs, was needed to produce the platinum used to hand develop the five platinotype prints that make up this work. Once again Starling refers to the complexity of the modern world. Among the uses of platinum, which is a highly prized precious metal, is that of catalyser in hydrogen fuel cells, which are one of the most promising sources of alternative energy of the future. In addition, platinum is used in the platinotype method of photographic development, widely employed between 1860 and 1920 but now obsolete.

One Ton II is closely related to Exposition, the work made by Starling for the Espai 13 of the Fundació Miró in Barcelona. Here, the artist juxtaposed cutting-edge contemporary technology and the evolution of the modern movement, taking as his starting point the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition, an event that was a showcase for both German technology and design of the period, with magnificent displays designed by Lilly Reich. Another key element in Exposition was once again platinum, which has a double role in this work; firstly in the photographs on the wall that show some of the designs by Lilly Reich for the display on German engineering at the 1929 Exhibition, and which were printed using the platinotype technique; and on the other, in the way these photographs are lit, using a hydrogen fuel cell, in which platinum is a key element as it acts as a catalyser that enables the necessary reaction between hydrogen and oxygen to come about, resulting in the production of electric current and a residual amount of water.

In the exhibitions in Malaga and St Ives, Simon Starling has focused on recent history and its connections with the present; on the Fascist past of the architecture of the Contemporary Art Centre of Málaga; on the conflictive past of the Cold War; on the past expressed through obsolete technologies; on St Ives’ past as a mining town and a cultural colony; and on the artist’s own recent past through, for example, the re-presentation of Autoxylopyrocycloboros in a full size replica of the gallery in which it was previously shown.

Whether constructing architectural models using material from the building itself, inserting one building inside another, magnifying small particles, transforming data into 3-D objects, making technological processes visible, rediscovering epic undertakings and journeys, making efforts out of all proportion to the results obtained or recalling bizarre stories, Simon Starling has evolved a conceptual approach and a working method based on journeys, routes, geographical shifts, translations, transformations, superimpositions, reproductions, loops and turns, and which mix genres, time-frames, techniques, humour, gravity and poetry. As the jury that awarded him the 2005 Turner Prize noted, Starling is outstanding for his: “[…] unique ability to create poetic narratives that draw together a wide variety of cultural, political and historical references.” Through his deconstructions, reconstructions and connections, Starling reveals the complexity of the real, the jumbled, crowded nature of the world in which we exist and its relationship to the most recent past.

1. In the case of the Tate, it was originally built in St Ives to celebrate and represent the Tate’s collection of works by artists associated with the colony, including Barbara Hepworth, Naum Gabo, Ben Nicholson, Patrick Heron and Peter Lanyon. In the case of the Pier, it houses the collection of Margaret Gardiner, a patron and collector who was a frequent visitor to St Ives through the middle of the last century, and who bought many of the works in her collecton from the artists living and working there.

2. The Danish artist Peter Land made a video entitled The Lake (2000) in which he dressed as a hunter and presented himself about to shoot duck from a boat. His first shot made a hole in the boat, which slowly sunk.

3. Lynch, Sean, “Simon Starling and assorted notes on The Atomic Theory”, in Concrete Light, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick, 2008, p. 11

4. Henry Moore quoted in Art Journal, New York, Spring 19, p. 286.

[Text for the catalogue of the exhibition by Simon Starling at CAC Málaga, 2010]

To point out, show, indicate, inform, point out, underline, guide… This seems to be the key in a society saturated with information, where the problem is not so much access but decoding. Lists, summaries and classifications seem to give us a bit of order and stability, even though we know that formulas such as “the top 40” respond to purely commercial motivations. Perhaps that is why some artists have taken it upon themselves to show the absurdity of any type of classification or list. This is the case of Claude Closky’s taxonomies (inventories of the first thousand issues ordered alphabetically) or Ignasi Aballí’s lists (of artists, cinema or money in which he simply cuts out the word in question from the newspaper to compose said lists).

We know it’s absurd, but we also need quick guides that we can read diagonally and that draw a map of the “here and now”: the international art scene, video artists, emerging artists, global artists, and endless possibilities. Some publishers know this. Taschen updates its “100 Contemporary Artists” volumes almost annually, in which on one page we find the basic information we need to be able to speak with authority about an artist: a photograph of the artist, an image of a work and a brief text that summarises his work in a clear and precise manner. Phaidon has continued to reinvent itself since it began in 1998 with “Cream”, “an authoritative view on the art world of today and tomorrow”, followed by “Fresh Cream” (2000), “an indispensable guide to 100 cutting-edge artists worldwide; “Cream3” (2003), “Ice:Cream” (2007), “a global survey of some of the most significant emerging artists working today” and recently “Creamier”, in which they also position those who make the selection: “10 Curators, 100 Contemporary Artists, 10 Sources”. Exit Express also tries to become a reference with “100 Spanish Artists” and “100 Video Artists”.

The biennials (and their catalogues) also end up becoming reference guides to discover, observe or follow the career of artists. Venice, Documenta, Manifesta, Liverpool, Sao Paulo often seem like a board game of the goose in which artists go “from goose to goose”. This insistence on the part of the curators can be due to very diverse reasons, ranging from a genuine interest in the artist, to the need to play it safe, to a lack of research, a lack of imagination, insecurity or simply laziness.

Whether an exhibition or edition of a biennial can or cannot be a reference in the future is something impossible to predict and which only time will confirm. This was the case with “When attitudes become Form” curated in 1969 by Harald Szeemann or with “Anys 90. Distància zero” curated in 1994 by José Luis Brea.

[Article published in Bonart, 2010]

Link to the article in A*DESK

The clichés associated with photojournalism have long since collapsed. Although this crisis is not new, the reflection that the exhibition we are now discussing is.

Traditionally, the mission of photojournalism was to bring us closer to reality, often a distant and conflicting reality. The photojournalist had the task of reporting on this reality, on this “truth”, becoming a witness and offering “the image” – unique and representative – of the fact in question.

The crisis of photojournalism is not new, at least since the mythical image of Robert Capa’s militiaman that turned out not to be true. But now it is no longer content with a single image but with proposing other objects and telling other/multiple stories. Logical if we think about the multiplication of agents and channels of communication.

La Virreina. Centro de la imagen presents another good exhibition, curated by Carles Guerra and Thomas Keenan, which makes a good inventory and analysis of all the facets that affect the transformation of photojournalism. It begins with a work that lays bare all the mechanisms of news construction, with Phil Collins’ video, “How to make a refugee” (1999), which records the process of photographing a young Kosovar refugee, who is invited to take off his shirt, put on a cap, pose with other refugees and define a setting to represent what in the photographer’s imagination is the perfect image of a refugee and his family. The cynical thing about the matter is that the conversations held during the making of the photograph show an exaggerated concern for questions of “stylism” and no interest in knowing the personal or political circumstances of the protagonist of the image.

After this beginning, which cannot put the work of the photojournalist into further crisis, the exhibition presents an inventory of all the problematic aspects or new situations that affect it: the discovery of another reality that the photojournalist did not count on (through the snapshots that Paul Fusco took from the train carrying Robert Kennedy’s coffin, which showed numerous citizens who wanted to get close to him to pay their last respects to their president and which became a portrait of the America of the moment); the trivialization of images of horror (in the form of video clips made by the same television cameramen); the use of high technology (satellites) or of a much more generalized technology from which anyone can send news to the whole world (the case of the demonstrations in Iran recorded from mobile phones and broadcast on the Internet); the archive (as the last possibility to construct identity and create memory, as occurs with the archives of photographs of Kurdistan collected by Susan Meiselas or of the destroyed buildings in Gaza by Eyal Weisman). After all this, we can only be left with the ambiguity and even the cynicism of Renzo Martens’ gaze in “Episode III – Enjoy Poverty” to take us on a tour of the Congo and show many of the contradictions of our present that can never leave us indifferent: NGOs that have to abandon locations not because they have finished their work but because of the transfer of UN troops that protect companies that extract gold from certain areas; Unicef ​​logos on each and every one of the bags used by refugees in the camps and, most importantly, that poverty is a resource and generates wealth but, unfortunately, not for those who possess said resource, that is, for the poor.

Continuing with the virtues of “Antifotoperiodismo”, we must mention the careful articulation of the exhibition, both in relation to the space and between the different works. This is the case of the relationship established between the slide presentations of images from Paul Fusco’s “RFK Funeral Train” (1968) and Alan Sekula’s “Prayer for the Americans” (1999-2004), one becoming the continuation of the other in the portrait of an unofficial but profound America; the view from the third room of Hito Steyerl’s red screens, located further back, which constitute a subtle and not at all illustrative commentary on the excess of images of conflicts and disasters; or, finally, the incursion of Eyal Weisman’s archives of destroyed Palestine into the space where Susan Meiselas’ archives of images from Kurdistan are shown, evidencing the possibilities of image archives to preserve identities in danger. This is precisely the most questionable area of ​​the exhibition since it perhaps opens up the main theme of “Antiphotojournalism” too much and especially considering that Meiselas will be the protagonist of an exhibition in the same center. But even the presence of less interesting works, such as Laura Kurgan’s satellite images or Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s non-images of dead people, provide relevant elements or arguments to the main topic of discussion.

Human beings need to trust in reality, to hold on to it, even if we are aware that we live in non-reality. In other words, what the media calls reality is nothing more than a construction. Two recent exhibitions, the Berlin Biennial and Antifotoperiodismo, at the Virreina Centro de la Imagen, in Barcelona, ​​address the issue of reality, although with an emphasis on different aspects.

Was draußen wartet (What is waiting out there) is the title chosen by Kathrin Rhomberg, curator of the Berlin Biennial. Her approach is based on the idea that we live in non-reality, we know the public lies (which range from weapons of mass destruction to the economic crisis) but at the same time we need to have “real” references. The works she has selected move in two directions: those intended to show the mechanisms of construction of reality, on the one hand, and those that explore an everyday reality that passes through personal experience. Among the first, Renzo Martens’ video Episode 3 (2008) stands out, a 90-minute film set in the Congo. Starting from seemingly innocent questions (why do all the bags that UNICEF provides to refugees and that they use to cover the roofs of their houses have a logo? or does the plane that comes to collect gold and mineral samples bring medicine on the outbound journey?) a “reality” is revealed in which UN troops protect the companies that extract the gold and when they finish their work and move on, the troops do so as well and, consequently, the NGOs must do so. But Martens does not fall into Manichaeism. The reality is much more complex. He does not allow the viewer to stop thinking and feel “touched” by the photographs of starving children, but rather makes explicit the codes of construction of images of poverty. The entire film revolves around one idea: the exploitation of poverty by agencies and NGOs, among others. In scenes that cannot leave us indifferent, Martens tries to convince the photographers of a local photography studio that if they convert their business and instead of parties and celebrations they record everything negative (misery, death and violence), they can earn a little money. And he accompanies them and instructs them in the way they should portray starving naked children, emphasizing their malnutrition, just as agency photographers do. Of course, nobody buys the work of local photographers. Nothing changes and Martens’ film (like the photographs of poverty) are not for “them”, for the inhabitants of the Third World, but for us, for the consumers of the First World.

This film is also present in Antifotoperiodismo, the exhibition curated by Carles Guerra and Thomas Keenan that analyzes the crisis of traditional photojournalism and the opening to less hegemonic positions and more critical views. Exhibitions like these and works like Martens’ reconcile us with the idea that through art it is still possible to change the perception of some things.

[Article published in Bonart, 2010]

Link to the article published in A*DESK

Museums have long since recovered and studied in depth the works of conceptual artists, but now it is the market that brings them to the forefront, as well as younger artists who quote, reread and research their references.

Lawrence Wiener already wrote this in his famous “Declaration of Intent” (1968):

– 1. The artist may construct the piece.
– 2. The piece may be fabricated.
– 3. The piece need not be built.
– Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition remains with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.

A couple of decades ago, museums began to recover and study all those practices that had taken place in the 60s and 70s and that, precisely in opposition to the museum-institution-art system, opted for strategies that escaped the limits and codes of said institutions. Events, performances, meetings, documents, audios and videos became the records or the materialisation of projects that were more committed to identifying art and life, that is, to the here and now than to their durability and musealisation. In the last twenty years, large and small museums around the world have been responsible for recovering, studying and documenting all these works, from Hans Haacke to Vito Acconci or Marina Abramovic, passing through all the groups of conceptual artists from Catalonia, the former Eastern European countries or the various Latin American countries.

In parallel, some collectors were generating reference collections, such as the Herbert couple in Belgium, who understood their role as taking an active part in a social and political movement and offered their support to artists such as Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry or Ian Wilson, among others, or the editor Guy Schraenen, who collected art between the 60s and 80s, without forgetting to collect all the parallel documentation (posters, invitations, photos, films, etc.) related to the works. Both collections have also been shown extensively in different museums and have served as a reference and model for other collections founded more recently.

Conceptual art has not only been revived but is also recognised by the market, as confirmed by the recent edition of the Basel art fair held just a few weeks ago, where works by artists such as Lawrence Weiner, Helena Almeida, Nancy Spero, Antoni Muntadas and filmmakers such as Harun Farocki and Agnès Varda could be found. The revival continues and a good example is the early works and documents of General Idea that A.A. Bronson, the only member of the group still alive, is producing.

There are many artists from the younger (and not so young) generations who have drawn from the sources of conceptual art, from its content, attitudes and/or from its forms. Some of these artists, such as Mario García Torres, not only investigate with their work some unknowns related to conceptual works (Alighiero Boetti’s Hotel One in Afghanistan or the work that Robert Barry proposed to his students when he was teaching in Halifax) but also curate exhibitions with artists of this generation, such as “Objetos para un rato de inertia” (Objects for a moment of inertia), which took place at the beginning of this year in the Elba Benítez gallery in Madrid and which brought together the works of David Askevold, Alighiero e Boetti, Luis Camnitzer, Barry Le Va and Francesc Torres. The declaration of principles was clear: “History, despite its insistence to the contrary, belongs to the present time. History is always being forged. It is a process, not a result. History and the writing of History are one and the same thing.”

The use of slides and slideshows, documents, inventories, diagrams, the investigation of facts and situations to make things evident, or performances that are diluted in public space… constitute an Ariadne’s thread (more the one referring to the techniques of navigation on Web pages than to the mythological one) that begins in the 60s and 70s and leads us directly to the performances of Dora García or Tino Seghal and their questions about the relationships between artist, work and public, to the search for vacant lots or the inventories of materials by Lara Almarcegui, to the lists of Ignasi Aballí, to the stories of Francis Alÿs, to the relationships between apparently distant facts by Simon Starling, to the evidence of Sean Snyder or to the “displays” of Erick Beltrán. This is a direct Ariadne’s thread, with less than six degrees of separation (since we are establishing literary parallels), although on too many occasions the legacy of the leitmotiv “when attitudes become form” has been left only with the forms.

Measuring is a way of knowing the magnitude of things, of controlling, of putting things in order. A recent novel by Daniel Kehlmann, The Measurement of the World, takes as its protagonists two historical figures, the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, a supporter of abstraction and logical deduction, and the astronomer Alexander von Humboldt, a naturalist and tireless explorer. Although they represent two ways of conceiving scientific knowledge, both shared an obsession: measuring the world. But we don’t need to go back to the transition between the 18th and 19th centuries to talk about order, measurements and, above all, obsessions. In a present deeply marked by the mania for effectiveness and the economy of time (and, why not say it here, by standardization and mediatization), the vindication of personal spaces, values ​​and logics can generate new ways of seeing things, of questioning the world or, simply, of approaching it, opposing it or evading it.

There is a whole genealogy of artists whose line of work questions the notion of order, shows that other logics are possible or highlights the absurdity of the economy of time. In Paradox of Praxis 1. Sometimes doing something leads to nothing (1997), Francis Alÿs walked a good stretch of Mexico City, pushing a heavy block of ice whose size gradually decreased until it disappeared completely. Literally, “sometimes doing something leads to nothing.” The French artist Claude Closky, on the other hand, builds taxonomies or, on the contrary, destroys systems by concluding that their logic is absurd. He makes, for example, inventories: the first thousand numbers classified alphabetically (Les 1000 premiers nombres classés par ordre alphabétique, 1989); He numbers the squares on a squared pad or lists the names in a telephone directory (8633 people I don’t know at Dôle, 1993).

Since the Trois stoppages étalon (1913-14) with which Duchamp created, as if it were a joke, a new image of the unit of measurement, many artists use their own subjective units of measurement, such as Stanley Brouwn, or detail the different measurements, such as the succession of canvases by Mel Bochner as a representation “of the world as a fantasy of quantifiable truth.”

There is no doubt that Daniel Jacoby belongs to this genealogy of artists who seek to approach the world from new or unusual points of view, highlighting the way in which, based on a certain scale of values, we structure our surroundings, loading them with meaning and authority. Like Duchamp, Brouwn, Bochner, Alÿs or Simon Starling, Daniel Jacoby wants to show how these values ​​can be disrupted, questioned and, in any case, not accepted as absolute. His work is based on the need to question the parameters and values ​​assumed.

With a will as playful as it is obsessive, Jacoby revels in unproductive efforts, in futile knowledge. He defines systems and methodologies, builds taxonomies and identifies an order in amorphous systems. In Weather Forecast for February 20th for the next 100 years he had the collaboration of the Department of Astronomy and Meteorology of the University of Barcelona to prepare a forecast for the next 100 years on February 20th (the date that coincided with his inauguration in Mollet del Vallés). He made musical and video reissues from the times the word “you” appeared (79 times) in the Beatles’ Abbey Road album (79 times “you” in the Abbey Road album), the word “no” in Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange (271 times “no” in “A Clockwork Orange”) or a whole repertoire of terms in strict alphabetical order (starting with the A of “actas” and ending with the Z “zamora”, passing through “ética”, “felicitarnos” and, of course, “yo”) from a fragment of a speech by President Hugo Chávez (Extracts from the speech of President Hugo Chávez on December 3, 2007, in alphabetical order). Following this idea of ​​creating order based on criteria that do not conform to standards, in a recent work, Für Eloise de Ludwig van Beethoven en order de tonality, the notes of the piano piece composed by Beethoven are ordered according to parameters different from those of the original composition: in this case, it is no longer a question of transmitting and evoking emotions through a melody as its author did, but rather reordering the notes starting from the lowest tone to progressively reach the highest note. An order, from less to more, that the artist also used in a more physical way when installing 894 documents from the Youth Documentation Centre in order of height, giving rise to an installation of clear minimalist references. In all these works Jacoby seems to insist that another type of order is possible.

He also proposed “dimensioning” the concepts of “grande” and “small”. What do we mean when we say that something is big? In relation to what? How do we quantify it? We can relate big to a huge paella for three hundred diners or to an ocean liner capable of holding thousands of passengers and small to a memory card to store images in a camera, but from a questionnaire answered by hundreds of people, Jacoby drew his conclusions: the absolute numerical value of the adjective “big” is equivalent to the distance between Bilbao and Salamanca, that is, 398,387.44 meters, while the absolute numerical value of the adjective “small” is equivalent to the diameter of a two-cent Euro coin, that is, 18.04 millimeters. You can’t be more precise. Or can you?

In some way, Daniel Jacoby’s work is sheltered by scientific methods (with its desire to measure, classify, order) and by references whose seriousness is beyond doubt (minimalism or classical music, to give two examples) to explore absurdity and outlandish ideas. Their conclusions, as precise as they are random, do not fail to show that the value of their work lies in their ability to ask questions that, from their apparent naivety, are free of all kinds of prejudice and preconceived ideas.

The mission of the project A Toblerone of exactly 50 g and (n) Toblerones of approximately 50 g was to find a Toblerone that weighed the exact 50 grams advertised on its packaging. Not so much to question the acclaimed Swiss precision but to celebrate the discovery, the moment when things are exactly as promised. The experiment began on December 3, 2009 at 7:58 p.m. The weighing process was carried out in a kind of home laboratory that included a precision scale, a clock to record the time and a photograph of each of the 492 Toblerones that were weighed until the one that met the requirements was found. Throughout the experiment, Toblerones were weighed that were far from the expected weight, either overweight (50.867 grams for the heaviest) or underweight (49.173 grams for the lightest). 26 days later, that is, on December 29, 2009 at 7:54 p.m., the experiment was ended because the digits that appeared on the scale with the weight of Toblerone number 492 were 50,000 grams.

In reality, the Toblerone Lab that Daniel Jacoby directed for 26 days was not very different from other scientific laboratories. Routine and everyday life are part of the day-to-day activities that take place there. In a laboratory, most of the daily work, the different experiments lead to nothing (often doing something leads to nothing) until the tests are aligned and precise results are reached. In the Toblerone Lab, many Toblerones had to be unwrapped, discarded and eaten until the wonderful encounter was reached, the maximum precision, the exactness. An exactness that is absolutely ephemeral since the conditions of the chocolate and other external elements could make the final result vary by a few milligrams.

In this way, Jacoby works with “serious” references, such as the conceptual, the scientific, the rigor and the systematic to reach that moment of precision that, in reality, is as random as it is useless, to show the absurd and the lack of sense, to shake the foundations of the “absolute truths”. Jacoby could belong to that other genealogy of Bartlebys who, instead of saying “I’d rather not” (as the protagonist of Melville’s story says), get involved in long and meticulous processes that lead nowhere. Precisely because the philosophy of “sometimes doing something leads nowhere” can be used to pose the most irreverent, radical and groundbreaking questions. Even if it doesn’t seem like it.

Montse Badia

[Text published in Daniel Jacoby’s catalogue in Cajasol, 2010]